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Blooming
Grove ranch going native -- with grasses Tuesday, June 05, 2007 By J.B. Smith Tribune-Herald staff writer BLOOMING GROVE, Texas — On a spring day, a visitor to the 77 Ranch is easily overwhelmed by the perfume of bluebonnets and sweet clover. Tall bluestem grass and red firewheel flowers sway in the breeze on the rolling prairie. But when Gary Price looks at his land, he sees a bovine buffet. “There’s over 200 species of forbs (a type of wild flowering plant) and grasses in this pasture,” he said, wading through grasses, mints and clovers on his Navarro County ranch. “It’s like going to a cafeteria. A cow can pick out what it wants. This is Indian grass here. For a cow, it’s like steak.” Price and his wife, Sue, have devoted the last three decades of their lives to growing better grass, the way nature intended it. That means restoring native grass species to the parts of their 2,160-acre ranch that have been abused by cotton farming and overgrazing. It also means managing a rare scrap of Blackland Prairie that has never been plowed. The Prices’ land stewardship was recently honored with the Leopold Conservation Award from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the nonprofit Sand County Foundation of Wisconsin. Parks and Wildlife officials lauded the Prices as visionaries whose ranch is a model of how to restore land to ecological health while remaining profitable. “The thing that stands out to me is, this is a landowner who clearly sees the whole picture, who understands the ecological processes and management practices that help the land function optimally,” said Jay Whiteside, a Texas Parks and Wildlife biologist who nominated the Prices for the award. The prairie restoration also helps water quality in downstream Richland Chambers Reservoir, which serves Fort Worth, said Darrel Andrews, an environmental official with the Tarrant Regional Water District. The thick grasses filter the water, slow runoff and result in less silt accumulation in the lake, he said. “What happens in the watershed drives water quality in the reservoirs,” he said. “The cleaner the water is, the easier it is to treat.” The Prices have embraced a way of ranching that bucks decades of conventional wisdom. It means passing over the quick payoff and investing instead in the long-term ecological health of the land. It means inviting a diversity of native vegetation instead of planting a monoculture, or single variety like coastal Bermuda grass, across an area. It means rotating fields and running 250 cattle on land that might otherwise support 400. On the other hand, the Prices don’t have to pay to fertilize their prairie grass, and they don’t have to bale it. The grass stalks remain edible in the field through the winter. And even in last summer’s drought, the mat of native grasses stayed green while neighbors’ thinner imported grasses withered. Cultivating success “We’re looking for sustainability, not a quick fix,” Gary Price said. “You may not run as many cattle, but you get healthier cattle with less feed costs. If you look at the big picture, you’re not giving up productivity. It’s like the turtle winning the race.” The Prices’ environmental ethic grew naturally from a life in agriculture. Gary Price, 58, grew up on a farm in nearby Ellis County and as a boy spent time on the 77 Ranch, then owned by a family friend, Lee Low. He earned a degree in animal science from Texas A&M University and worked in Lubbock, where he met his wife, a student at Texas Tech University. In 1976, Low sold the Prices the core of the ranch, which expanded over the years. They drove to the land to work every weekend. They soon moved to Blooming Grove, where he began ranching full time and she became a schoolteacher. Gary Price found that parts of the ranch were exhausted and eroded. Much of it once had been planted in cotton, as had most of the Blackland Prairie, the fertile crescent of Texas that runs east of Interstate 35. After the Great Depression, it was planted in Bermuda and in King Ranch bluestem, a low-growing grass that drives out other species and leaves land vulnerable to erosion. Bermuda lost cause “At one time, we thought Bermuda was the magic grass,” Price said. “Problem is, it’s a monoculture, and it’s very poor for wildlife. The quail can’t use it. And by continually baling hay off of it, you’re mining nutrients from the soil.” Price reintroduced native grasses and began a system of rotational grazing to prevent the cows from chewing the grass down to the ground. He also sparingly used herbicides, heavy equipment and fire to rid the land of mesquite trees. He took his inspiration from the small patch of virgin prairie land on the ranch, where many of the grass plants are more than half a century old. He noted that the healthy grasses crowded out noxious weeds and thorny shrubs. “Notice that you don’t see any mesquite here,” he said on a recent tour. “When you see a pasture with a lot of thorny species, it’s a symptom that something’s gone wrong. The seeds of mesquite are in here, and if we overgrazed this, they would come up.” With the restoration, the ranch became a haven of wildlife, including ducks, red-wing blackbirds and rare songbirds like the dicksissle, which lays its eggs in tall grass. The Prices earn additional income from dove and duck leases. A new generation? The Prices hope their adult son, now a manager of a large ranch in West Texas, will return in a few years to take over the ranch. “He loves it here,” Sue Price said. Meanwhile, Texas Parks and Wildlife has worked with the Prices and their neighbors to create more than 20,000 acres of habitat for bobwhite quail, a once-abundant species that has declined with habitat loss. Whiteside, the state biologist, said modern scientific management techniques can help landowners restore ecological diversity to the Blackland Prairie. “The accounts from early settlers talk about an endless sea of grass that was belly high on a horse,” he said. “You can’t bring it back completely. But we have the technology to restore some important grasses.” Price said many of his neighbors are interested in adopting some of his practices. He said the most receptive are the weekend ranchers who inherited land. “They are really more teachable and unbiased,” he said. “Some of the traditional practices we hang onto are absolutely right for the land, but some aren’t. I’m trying to see what the land is trying to grow instead of always fighting it.” jbsmith@wacotrib.com From:
Waco Tribune-Herald
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Blooming Grove Blossoms....article by Janet Jacobs. Corsicana Daily Sun 12/17/2006 |
